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A Real Food Fight

May 21, 2007 4:02 pmMay 21, 2007 4:02 pm

Paul Krugman responds to readers’ comments on his May 21 column, “Fear of Eating.”

R. Owen, Port Townsend: Thank you again, Mr. Krugman, for having the guts to point the finger squarely at one of the most intransigent enabling attitudes that perpetuate our economic addiction to all manor of exploitation and abuse.

To my way of thinking, saying that regulation hurts business and industry is like saying that speed limits make people late for work — there is a semblance of a logical argument, but only if you completely ignore all the other consequences. I wonder if the late Mr. Friedman also opposed speed limits, due to their potential for obstructing the free workings of the market place?

Paul Krugman: I bet he did oppose speed limits — although he was all in favor of daylight savings time, in the context of arguing for floating exchange rates … it’s a long story.

Barry Wiedenkeller, Bangkok: You know, you had the germ of an idea there, but I think you dropped the ball. Let’s not allow imports from countries and companies that will not allow inspection.

I suspect the U.S. market is too big to throw away, and I am further sure that many European countries would follow our lead on that. We don’t have much power left in the Bush-ridden world of 2007, but we do still have consumer power. Even a grassroots boycott of food from or containing Chinese foodstuffs would make a difference in China’s economy.

Paul Krugman: Germ of an idea? Was that a pun? Anyway, I’m thinking through the implications, but need to chew them over before I make a pronouncement on policy.

Rick Kane, Locust Grove, Va.: A similar story on the pharmaceutical side of the F.D.A. issue is the Oxy-Contin disaster. Oxy-Contin, a drug meant to ease pain for terminally ill cancer patients, was given off-label for every kind of pain complaint with the addictive qualities of the drug downplayed. A public health and crime disaster was created.

Friedman always assumed that corporations and their custodians would act in rational long-term interest, but he did not take into account irrational or at least just short-term interests of greed. Despite the fines, the company made $2 billion, apparently, on Oxy-Contin, 10 times what they would have made if they had just marketed the product for the limited market it was designed for. The only reason they stopped fighting the issue is the product went off patent, and without monopoly profits for their addictive product, they lost the incentive to continue to pay the legal costs to defend their criminal conspiracy.

Paul Krugman: If you actually read the Friedman interview, he seemed to argue that the threat of lawsuits would solve the problem. Trial lawyers, the saviors of capitalism! There are at least three problems with this. First, in the case of really severe damage, companies will simply disappear, leaving nobody to sue — which is, as I understand it, what happened to the melamine villains. Second, it’s hard to write the law so that companies are liable for “honest” errors — and that’s a huge loophole. Finally, as my joke about trial lawyers suggested, the same people who want to deregulate corporations also want to protect them from later suits.

Bernardo Guterman, Riverdale, N.J.: I find it interesting that the first villain mentioned in your article is globalization. The spinach involved in the e-coli scare was grown in the U.S. The peanut butter was made in the U.S., and, most probably, the chicken was raised in the U.S.

This doesn’t mean that the government shouldn’t inspect more of the food coming to our plates. But by mentioning globalization first, you increase the perception that everything foreign is dangerous, while everything made in America is safe.

In your assigning of blame, you miss the most important culprit: Ronald Reagan, who embraced so fervently Mr. Friedman’s ideas.

Paul Krugman: I didn’t mean to suggest that globalization is the prime villain, although Chinese food now scares me.

Dave Bayer, New York and Concord, Calif.: I’ve seen this from the other end of the telescope: The best soft-shell crab I’ve ever tasted was in southern Thailand. Thais have a love for impeccably fresh seafood, and these crabs are exported, frozen, to much of the world.

The locals rolled their eyes that only the U.S. market asked for additives to protect the seafood from imagined conditions at the source. Conditions were, in fact, pristine. Americans wishing to fuel their fears would do better to visit a domestic chicken farm.

Paul Krugman: Not to mention unpasteurized French cheese, which doesn’t seem to do the French any harm.

Vikas Chowdhry, Madison, Wis.: I think consumers — who are willing to spend thousands of dollars on consumer goods, but who look for cheap bargains in the food aisle — are primarily responsible for food-borne illness.

Centralization of food production and processing is a direct consequence of this search for cheap food, which in turn can lead to massive outbreaks of food-borne diseases.

After reading “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” I immediately subscribed to a community-supported local organic farm and will be enjoying pesticide-free fresh produce the entire summer. It is a little bit more expensive than my Super Wal-Mart, but I think the price difference, even over my entire lifetime, would still be less than the price of a 56-inch plasma TV, which I can live without.

David Lentini, San Francisco: You really hit the nail on the head in today’s column. The philosophy that somehow the market will determine what’s right and just is a pernicious fantasy that poisons us both physically and morally. How can anyone expect self-policing from an economic system that enables the rich to use the law and political power to obstruct investigations and hide information?

Growing up in the 1970s, I was a big fan of Friedman and the Chicago school of economics. As time has passed, I now see much of this work as the naive musings of tenured professors gone horribly wrong in the real read: selfish world. Adam Smith was clear that community morals and standards were an important brake on abuse by businesses. Why do so many who should know or have known better seem to think that efficiency in production really means maximizing profits regardless of how many get hurt?

N. L. Sliker, Lawrence, Kan.: Well, this column hits me in the bread basket of the heartland. I, too, stopped eating salads after I became extremely ill and my doctor called me to say that my test had evidence of e-coli. After a month of recuperation, I gave up eating salads. My one exception is home made coleslaw from the local natural foods coop, made only from the inner heart of locally-grown cabbage, and I’m even leery about that. I’m appalled at how our entire food chain has been corrupted.

Tracy Daniel, Montgomery, Ala.: Companies have gotten out of the business of producing a lot of ingredients because the Chinese undercut them. Now we know why and how — by cutting corners. It would be interesting to see how much smaller the price differential would be if Chinese suppliers had to adhere to the same standards as U.S. suppliers.

I call things like this the Wal-Martization of the world. Wal-Mart pushes suppliers relentlessly to provide ever lower prices. Up to now, it only resulted in goods that are cheap and don’t last long. Now it’s reached the point of danger. Companies are so concerned about profit that they’ll buy from the cheapest source possible without considering what exactly those low prices indicate. I don’t eat chicken or pork any more. There is no bread in my house. I’m in Alabama so I guess I can eat catfish.